What a Dubai apartment costs to run: the bills that are not the service charge

Ask what an apartment costs to run in Dubai and you will be quoted a service charge. That answer is incomplete in a specific and expensive way: the charge covers the common parts of the building, and a large share of what an owner actually pays falls outside it.

None of it is hidden. It is simply never in the listing.

What the service charge does cover

• The common parts: pool, gym, parking, lifts, cleaning, landscaping, building staff, insurance of the structure, the management company.
• Your share of the master community where there is one — roads, landscaping, lighting of common ground.
• The reserve fund for capital works on a ten to fifteen year cycle.

What it does not cover

• DEWA — electricity and water on your own meter, with a deposit at connection and a monthly bill thereafter.
• Internet and television.
• Contents and liability insurance. The building's own policy insures the structure, not the contents of your flat.
• Everything inside your walls. Appliances, the water heater, the internal split units where they are yours, repainting between tenancies. In a let unit this is a real annual line, not a contingency.

Cooling, the line that decides the total

• It is treated differently building to building. In some towers cooling sits inside the service charge; in others it is metered and billed on top by a district cooling provider.
• The annual difference runs to multiples, which makes cooling — not the headline charge — the item that most often ruins a comparison between two apartments.
• Ask two separate questions before you buy: is cooling inside the charge or outside it, and if outside, what did this specific unit consume last year. A seller who lived in the flat has the bills.
• A vacant flat still consumes cooling in a Dubai summer if the unit is not to be damaged, and in some buildings a standing capacity charge applies whether the flat is occupied or not.

Letting adds its own layer

• Agency commission on finding the tenant, at market practice of 5% of the annual rent.
• A management fee if someone else runs the tenancy for you, which a remote owner in practice needs.
• Ejari registration of the tenancy contract, renewed each year.
• Void months. The most commonly omitted line in a yield calculation, and the one that costs most: the service charge and cooling carry on regardless.
• The municipality housing fee falls on the rental value and is collected through the tenant's DEWA account — worth knowing about when negotiating a rent, because it is part of what the occupier pays to live there.

Villas work differently, and it is worth understanding why

A villa's community charge is normally levied on plot area rather than built area, and running a villa often ends up three to four times cheaper than an apartment of comparable size. The reason is not generosity: with an apartment you are also paying for the tower's shared infrastructure — lifts, pool, gym, corridors, staff — and a villa has none of it. The offset is that maintenance inside the plot is entirely yours: garden, irrigation, pool if there is one, the AC plant and the exterior of the house. In a tower those are somebody's job; in a villa they are your budget and your contractor.

The one-page test before you commit

• The approved service charge for the building, from the Land Department's own index rather than from the seller.
• Cooling: inside or outside, and last year's actual figure for the unit.
• Three years of charge history and the direction of travel.
• What you will spend inside the walls in year one — a let unit is handed over in lettable condition or it does not let.

Based on the Land Department's service charge framework and standard market practice on letting.